Does anyone use a roamio (or a mini) with a switch?

Yes, I do. Before we moved I had no problem getting MOCA to work. But when we moved to this apartment I just couldn't get it working. I tried using powerline connectors, but had limited success. I am able to get one of them working, but when I try to run two of them I have problems with the Minis.

So right now I have one running off the powerline and one with a direct ethernet wire. Both of those are run through a gigibit ethernet switch. My Roamio is also run into the same switch. The only time I have an issue is if I'm using the telephone, which is VOIP.

 

Are you having a problem with a switch or are you concerned of Tivo statement they don't support them?

Only time I seen problems with TiVo's and switches has been connecting a dumb switch to a managed switch, in that situation the dumb switch wouldn't connect as the managed switch was a Gb switch and the dumb one was just a 10/100.

 

Even though I have Verizon FiOS I don't use their router because I have no need to with Tivo. Instead I use the Roamio Plus as the bridge. Basically I have my Cat 5e coming in from the ONT to my main router, then one of those ethernet ports goes to my bonus room which has a switch in it. This is where I have my Roamio which bridges the ethernet and cable together. I have had no issues at all and the switch has worked great. It is a TP Link TL-SG108 8 port. It's on amazon for $30.

 

I use two on my network, a Netgear Prosafe GS105 and a Netgear Prosafe GS108, with a TiVO Roamio Pro plugged directly into the GS105. I haven't had any problems.

 

I use around fifteen Dlink Gigabit switches(8 port and 5 port-all unmanaged). Before I recently moved my TiVos to MoCA they were connected to some of these Gigbit switches and they worked fine on them.

 

I use a a linksys/cisco SE2500 switch which has my Roamio plus, Samsung TV, and Blu-ray player hooked into it. The switch then connects to another linksys/cisco SE2500 switch which is then connected to a Sonicwall NSA 240. The switch that is connected to the Sonicwall is also connected to an Apple Airport Extreme and two other computers in my wired network. I have two other Apple Airport Extremes that act as a wireless bridge to connect my two other entertainment areas. One with a Premiere XL, Blu-ray, and Sony tv and the other an OLED S3 and a Blu-ray. I have no problems streaming between any combo of TiVos and no problem streaming to my iPad in-house or out of the house. All the cabling in my network is either Cat 5e or Cat 6.

 

All of my TiVo's and mini's go through at least 2 switches and some 3 switches and have never had a problem with any of them.

I use the TP-Link TL-SG105 (5 ports) and TL-SG108 (8 ports).

 

My Roamio hops through three switches, two of which are 10/100's that are about to get the hook... Netgear FS605 v2

I am finally getting around switching them over to Tp-link switches I picked up several months ago... 8 Port Gigabit, TL-SG108. Comcast just boosted me to 105 mbps service.... never though 100mb network would be a bottleneck!

 

My Roamio Pro is connect through 2 switches actually. Roamio connects to a switch in the AV cabinet, which runs via CAT6 to the basement and connects to a switch there, which runs to the router. No problems whatsoever.

 

I learned the hard way that "cheap" switches give you exactly what you pay for. Unless they honor priority tags, priority tagging/packets get stripped out, and all traffic gets treated equally.

The switch I'm posting a link to allows for both honoring and passing priority tagging, and also has the ability to assign priority based on each port (a manual way).

Best of all, it's on sale right now for 20 bucks. I've replaced every switch in my house with either ones that honor and pass the priority tags, or these (mostly at end-points):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-EMC-042914-Index-_-Switches-_-33122363-L018B

NETGEAR 5 Port Gigabit Desktop Switch (GS605AV)
Limit 2 per customer.

$59.99

$19.99
WITH PROMO CODE
EMCPFHA72

 

ok, i got off my butt and put in the other two switches...

 

I meant to add that myself I use a couple Nortel 5510 24 port switches but these are enterprise switches, I only use them because the are very cheap and Nortel switches are the brand I have supported for my employer for the last 20 years. Most people will find these total over kill as these are layer 3 IP routing switches, terrible energy burners but awesome management and diagnostics.

 

I had some trouble with a mini and a Cisco 10/100/1000 switch. I gave up and used a different switch.

 

The biggest problem with residential switches is that the majority of them have no management. Unlike the simplest network diagnostics that the ethernet interfaces in the TiVo's can report, when you attach devices to an unmanaged switch you have no reporting of errors, data rates or anything. This is why Tivo takes the postion that "switches" are not supported.

If you are looking for a switch, the best solution is one that has some type of Web interface were you can monitor and even in some cases configure port speed. The biggest problem I have encountered is port speed mismatch esp in older ethernet interfaces and older ports for example if you are using a 10/100 mb ethernet switch, some 1gb ethernet devices attached to it may not be able to negotiate the speed correctly. I have seen a old netgear 10mb switch that if you attached a 1 Gb device to it, the link lights would light up, activity lights would blink but no communications would occur.

Another issue too when dealing with 1gb ethernet and switches, you must have some type of intelligence in monitoring the port otherwise you are running blind, a bad ethernet cable can be the problem just as I saw recently were someone was having a mini connection problems problem, they replaced everything including Tivo replacing the Mini until finally they replaced the cable to find the first one was bad.

Regardless, the majority of newer switches will work fine with Tivo products, Tivo takes the postion they do for support reasons as they have to draw the line in what they can support and what they can't in home data networks. On the same merit, all switches aren't created equally and you get what you pay for, managed is better. In this day and age, the built in 5 port switch on your router just won't hack it when you have 4 TiVo's, a couple pc's, a networked shared printer, and even perhaps a NAS. I have a larger than average consumer home network, my primary network has up to 20 nodes on it at any given time and I laughed at Tivo support when they told me that Tivo won't work on "switches", even if turned everything else off, I only have switched 5 ports built into my router and yet have at least 6 Tivo devices so there is no way I could use just the router port switch ports if I wanted to!

 

What sort of problem are you having? Since the spring update hit, I've had nothing but problems with one of my Minis connecting to my Roamio Pro. It had worked flawlessly for six months and now it works probably less than 50% of the time.

I thought I had narrowed it down to an issue where things were buggy if the Pro was on MoCa and the Mini was on Ethernet, but it seems to be a more subtle problem than that... I have three Minis, and two always work over MoCa regardless of if the Pro is on MoCa or Ethernet, but the Mini on Ethernet doesn't seem to reliably work at all. That's a new issue.

Might be unrelated to what you're seeing, but who knows ...